


You're One Of My Rogues

by sixthletter



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Gen, acrobat!brendon, and a gentle sense of doom, circus AU, journalist!ryan, where the main attraction is SADNESS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-24
Updated: 2007-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27089212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixthletter/pseuds/sixthletter
Summary: "The problem with running away to join the circus," Brendon says, "is that the circus always looks better in the movies."
Kudos: 1





	You're One Of My Rogues

Ryan's meant to be doing something general, something about the rise of three-minute culture and dumbing down and the triumph of spectacle over skill; something about art which fails to imitate life and life that's dependant on art; something about the decay of family values and the good old days and the cold sweat when you wake from the American dream. Something with a wicked cool photospread. 

He toes the sawdust, turns wet clods of it over with the tip of his shoe, tosses the dictaphone from one hand to the other.

"The problem with running away to join the circus," Brendon says, "is that the circus always looks better in the movies."

_

The movie's a biopic. It tells one of those feel-good, wide-angle, sepia-toned stories about a boy who goes against his family's wishes, works hard and dreams harder, gets good, gets famous, gets a gig all of his own. Escapes from the city and sets up this big Victorian circus, all bright lights and painted elephants and dancing girls, and the final scene has the kid (now a man) striding into the ring on opening night as Kate Bosworth cheers him on and Al Pacino, his aging, once-estranged father, gives a nod of masculine approval and blinks back a masculine tear. 

It's a fucking awful movie.

It's a fucking ironic one, too, because the circus this guy started, with its gas-lit big top and its rows of sequinned women, is now shitty and bankrupt and on its last run before it shuts down for good.

Apparently, Ryan's editor's really into irony.

"So," Brendon ("with an E and an O," he explained once he saw the tape recorder) asks, "are you going to write patronising bullshit?"

Ryan tilts his head a little, follows the arc of a ball as it passes through a hoop in mid-air then lands with a smack in Brendon's opposite palm. He's not entirely sure what Brendon does - he doesn't talk much about work and doesn't seem important, which is probably why he's stuck babysitting the journalist - but he _is_ the only one Ryan's found so far who gives honest answers of more than one syllable. "Yeah," he says eventually. "Probably. Patronising's usually our angle."

"It was a shittty movie."

"You think so?"

"We never had bears, okay? Or an elephant. And the guy, my grandad knew him, says he had all the charm of the elephant man, basically cheated his way into this. They make him out to be all _talented_." He throws another hoop, another ball. "Not that you don't have to be talented, it's hard and all, there are risks, it's totally..." He leans down, lips almost against the microphone and intones: "Don't Try This At Home Kids," and then, after a pause, "and don't run away from home to try it, either."

Hoop. Ball. Hoop.

Ryan says, "Show me how to do that?"

-

The owner, the man who Ryan will call the ringmaster in his article, regardless of his actual role, wears loud shirts and smiles too much. He is not, sadly, a distraught ancestor of the film's protagonist, who lies awake at night thinking of what his family once was and what they have been reduced to, and what a traitor and a failure this makes him. That guy shot himself six months ago. "Yeah, he blew his head off," the owner says, leaning back in his chair and kicking his feet up onto the table which takes up most of the trailer, "and they were all set to close down there and then, but I'd just come into money," (this is accompanied by a grin which Ryan takes to mean 'and run out of sense') "and I thought: 'how awesome would it be to run a circus?' Everyone wants to do that when they're young. It's got to be awesome. And it is, we have some awesome people here. The people we have are awesome."

"And yet you're closing up."

"You've gotta understand, the crowds we get are awesome. The kids, their faces light up, it's beautiful. They're real appreciative, they're fantastic. They're just. Y'know. Sparse."

"Sparse."

"Yeah. It means there aren't very many of them."

Ryan thinks about what he's seen so far - twenty or so squat plastic trailers shining like broken bottles in the sun; red-and-white canvas slowly turning uniform grey with age and dirt; skinhead clowns with smeared makeup and nicotine-coloured teeth; doe-eyed Balkan-born gymnasts without green cards. He wonders how his editor would feel about an article on how perceptive young children can be.

-

Spencer says: "Ryan, I love you, but if come back with an article on evil clowns I will not only end your career, I will cremate it, mix the ashes with concrete and bury them in a place the police will never think to look. Am I making myself clear?"

-

Brendon's an acrobat. Part of the trapeze team. Wears green tights. Ryan is almost too professional to find this amusing.

"Seeing as this is the last tour, I guess you're all working hard to make it memorable? For the crowd and yourselves?"

Brendon stretches, arching backwards. "Not really," he huffs, a little breathless. "It's. It's not really for anything any more, is it? We're not even fighting to keep it now, we've quit and we're just waiting to stop. Like, you hit the breaks, but you're still coasting forward on nothing? This is that. This is the nothing time."

"Like when you know it's a dream and you're just waiting to wake up?"

Brendon straightens, pulls one leg up, then the other. "Maybe. But it's definitely more like when you break."

-

Ryan sleeps in the back of what is sometimes the ticket booth. He's lulled to sleep by the hum of the engine and jolted awake by the dips in the road.  
  
He dreams of rising, falling. Ball, hoop, ball.  
  
-  
  
"You suck at this," is Brendon's only response to Ryan's attempts to juggle.  
  
"You suck at teaching."  
  
"No, no, it's definitely you." He lunges for a ball as Ryan throws it wildly far of its imaginary mark. "Okay, I get that you have no sense of direction, but seriously, can you not tell up from down?"  
  
Ryan is almost professional enough not to swat at him with a hoop.  
  
-  
  
Ryan wants to call Patrick lively. Animated, even. Possibly say something about him being a vital personality. Unfortunately, Jon photographs faces as opposed to dreams, so Patrick will come across as your average far-end-of-the-middle-aged guy - a little thick in the middle, a little thin on top, a little grey around the temples and red in the face - and maybe, maybe people will be able to pick up that he's full of easy-going road-worn wisdom, maybe they'll believe it when Ryan writes that, but he's seen the pictures and doesn't think so.  
  
"The movie..." Patrick sighs the kind of full-body shoulder-slumping sigh that Ryan is sure shouldn't be possible in real life. "It feels like half of a movie to me. For a lot of us, it's the first half of our lives. We weren't there at the time, obviously, but before I was a driver I tamed tigers and before that I was a clown and before that I studied pre-law, so there is, there's definitely that element there. The escapism of it. I think they captured that really well." He sighs again, scratches absently at a scar on his forearm.   
  
Tiger bite, Ryan decides. Nearly severed. Three weeks in a hospital. Back in the ring while he was still in bandages. Plucky little circus person, fighting in the face of reality.  
  
-  
  
Spencer says: "If you write me an article about how we should all hold hands and live in nomadic peace and harmony like fairytale gypsies, I will run you over then reverse."   
  
-  
  
"I'm really stoked about this, the exposure," the owner grins. "Totally. Maybe it'll bring the crowds in, buoy us up enough for another season."  
  
-  
  
"It makes no sense," Brendon sings, hands drumming against the steering wheel in time to the radio, "but we'll stay here to the end. They shoot horses, don't they? They shoot horses don't theeeey?" He turns it into something ridiculous, all low croons and falsetto wails, and Ryan laughs like he's supposed to.  
  
-  
  
Last day. Final question: "What are you going to do next?"  
  
Drive. Tame trucks.  
  
E-commerce, dude. A friend of mine, he has this setup where...  
  
Run away to Hollywood and have all my dreams come true.  
  
"Hollywood?"  
  
Brendon shrugs. "Why the hell not? My family have been doing this for generations. They talk about old acrobats like they were war heroes. I don't really want to be doing, like, kids' parties or something after that."  
  
"But still," Ryan pushes, "why Hollywood?"  
  
Brendon shrugs, drops his cigarette butt, toes it out on the damp sawdust.  
  
"The thing about running away to join the circus," he says, "is that the circus always looks better in the movies."


End file.
